Bear country

Golden bears ... Sacha Bourdo, Gael Garcia Bernal and Alain Chabat in The Science of SleepLast week film-maker Lucy Muss reported from the Clermont-Ferrand international short film festival. This week she joins the starlets, hacks and industry bigwigs vying for a ticket at the Berlin film festival.

If you were queuing at Clermont-Ferrand you'll be jostling with brute force at Berlin. Welcome to the brave and exciting but not-so-new world of the Berlin film festival. Now in its 56th year, the festival runs concurrently with a market place for international buyers - hence the jostling.

A press pass is still like gold dust to buyers, who stampede their way to a preview screening to get an early bid in; especially if it is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry's latest, The Science of Sleep, starring the heart-throb and throbbing talent Gael Garcia Bernal (yes, it's wonderful, it's ridiculous, it plays with your heart and your reality and makes you do a little skip as you leave the cinema). Another favourite is the German adaptation of Michel Houellebecq's cult novel Atomised, whose current UK working title is The Elementary Particles - I don't know what they'll do with the name, but I do know it is one of the best films of the year and Momentum snapped up the UK rights yesterday, so watch this space.

Centred around Potsdamer Platz, but more specifically functioning behind glass walls and in hotels - accreditation is at the Grand Hyatt, starlets lay back at the Ritz-Carlton and the rest of the time is spent in enormous locations including the stunning Martin Gropius building - there is a certain Lost in Translation feel about the Berlin festival.

Indeed, this year 240 companies from 45 countries are attending the new European Film Market, along with more than 18,000 film industry visitors, almost 3,800 journalists and nearly 4,000 film entries. Oh, and there were over 3,500 applicants from 121 countries for the Berlinale Talent Campus, which is some consolation, perhaps, for mine not getting in.

Such an immense wealth of talent in such a concentrated space sets a rather manic pace to the day, lends an incredible buzz to the city and presents an overwhelming, and perhaps unenviable, task for the jury; this year presided over by the wondrous Charlotte Rampling and including Spielberg's director of photography Janusz Kaminski.

It is easy to forget, as we whizz about with our press packs, grabbing free nibble and grappling with programme timetables, that we're here to see, in the words of the festival director, "how refreshing, exhilarating, heart-warming, sad and beautiful cinema can be".

Yesterday I saw three films: the first, a Danish film called En Til En (1:1,) focused on two ethnically divided families whose kids had fallen fatally in love as a brother lay dying due to racial differences - a Romeo and Juliet of our times, it was flawed but hard-hitting. 10 minutes later I was giggling against my will at a flighty, fluffy, pointless but funny French film Quatre Étoiles, which, after an excellent opening scene, turned into an extended version of the "Papa? Nicole?" car advert.

After that, I was handed a ticket and told the next film was Danish. I walked in blank and walked out brimming with emotion, tearful with idealism, shocked and amazed. The film was called Drommen (We Shall Overcome This), and the audience cheered, ovated and clapped till their palms were raw.

Amid my flushed appreciation my boyfriend, two doors down, who acquires film for a major UK distributor, was suffering at the hands of Requiem, a dark story about exorcism from Germany, which left him, apparently, "wanting to kill himself". It's all here in Berlin, it seems.

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